Rivaling schools during the twentieth century
The Eurocentric orientation of historiographical cultures in general and world history in particular continued during much of the twentieth century. Within a global constellation that clearly differentiated between “advanced” and “backward” societies, it is small wonder that rather Eurocentric master narratives of world history remained strong in different societies and languages.
In many history education systems, “world historical” scholarship often boiled down to the study of advanced societies, most notably Western powers. No matter whether in Africa, in South Asia, East Asia or elsewhere: voluminous works narrated the history of the world chiefly as the rise of the West.The important position of Western history, which was often labeled as “world history,” is evidenced by the very fact that some of the most influential minds behind nation formation efforts published their own reflections on Western and world history. Examples across various generations range from the Japanese reformer Fukuzawa Yukichi (d. 1901) to the Chinese scholar and public intellectual Liang Qichao (d. 1929) and the Indian scholar and statesman Jawaharlal Nehru (d. 1964). Nehru's famed Glimpses of World History, written in prison during the colonial period, was openly critical of Western imperialism and not driven by the concern that India needed to emulate Western experiences. Yet at the same time the text did not abandon the idea that as a civilization, Europe's rise carried great cultural, political and intellectual implications for societies in other parts of the world.[64]
Eurocentric conceptions of world history could (and still can) be observed within rather different political contexts. For instance, in line with Marxist traditions world history was granted a strong institutional presence in a rather wide spectrum of Communist countries.
There were certainly significant differences between the cultures of historiography in single socialist societies, and yet among them the field of world history shared many elements in common. The field was typically dominated by nation-centered perspectives and teleological outlooks that ascribed European history a key role in international developments that would supposedly culminate in a global communism. At certain times, historians in countries like the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China had quite some leeway to maneuver around the conceptual blocks of historical materialism. Yet as a general tendency, world historical works produced in Communist countries were framed around Marxist-Leninist theories and timelines that had been derived from the study of European history. For example, during the Mao period entire cohorts of Chinese historians were seeking to relate the Chinese and global past to concepts such as “bourgeoisie” and “feudalism” even though these had been derived from the European context.[65] Moreover, Chinese world historical works tended to focus on the history of the West and the Soviet Union, thereby marginalizing other parts of the world.Certainly, local factors, ranging from institutional settings to political conditions and from intellectual traditions to funding structures, continued to season national and world history in different countries and world regions. Moreover, there were prominent counter-movements to this overarching trend.[66] For instance, during the interwar period several European societies witnessed the publication of very well-known works seeking to leave nation- and Europe-centered perspectives behind. An example is Oswald Spengler's (d. 1936) Decline of the West, which was first published in German between 1918 and 1922.[67] The work challenged the notion of universal science and, as an alternative, it was framed around the idea of rather independent civilizational cycles.
Within that structure, Spengler portrayed the trajectories of Western modernity as the forces of a civilizational downward movement - which gained him much fame in conservative circles across Europe.Whereas Spengler had openly positioned himself against the historiographical establishment at universities, another famous world historian of the time, ArnoldJ. Toynbee (d. 1975), operated from the firm basis of various British institutions of higher learning. In his magnum opus, A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961, Toynbee sought to grasp the history of humankind and global interactions while carefully avoiding Western triumphalist narratives. Toynbee focused on cultural and spiritual factors (rather than political and materialist patterns) as the driving forces of history. Not convinced by national perspectives, civilizations were his preferred main containers when thinking about history on a worldwide scale.
Also in other parts of the world, there were numerous voices criticizing Eurocentric teleologies. For example, transnational groups such as the Negritude Movement openly articulated their doubts about the promises of materialism, scientism and other “white mythologies.”[68] Moreover, quite a number of intellectuals in Asia at least partly directed their critique of Western epistemologies against interpretations of Europe as the cradle of worldwide progress.[69] Whereas some prominent historians like the aforementioned Eric Williams and the late Liang Qichao partook in intellectual movements of this kind, history departments in many countries remained hardly affected by such critical interventions.
Similarly, historians like Toynbee and Spengler found little resonance within the historians' guildhalls in Europe and the United States. Certainly, especially after the Second World War there were some important examples for world historical works seeking to explore new horizons.
Some of them even gained considerable fame, for example The Rise of the West by William McNeill, who taught at the University of Chicago and had worked with Arnold Toynbee.[70] In this work, McNeill did not seek to provide a triumphant account of North Atlantic societies but rather sought to relativize the era of Western dominance by placing it into wider world historical contexts. He emphasized that prior to the sixteenth century, the continental nexus of Eurasia and Africa had been characterized by other large-scale power systems that had not been centered on Europe. McNeill actually left the question open whether other global power constellations beyond Western hegemony would emerge in the future.Yet despite the rather enthusiastic reception of McNeill's work, world history in the United States long remained a field that had its institutional basis in small colleges. Likewise, it did not play a more pronounced role in Europe. Arguably the most active historical research field, which already at a rather early stage paid much attention to global connections and entanglements, was economic history. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System, the first volume of which appeared in 1974,[71] was widely influential among economic historians. Departing from earlier theoretical schools, Wallerstein provided an elaborate study of what he saw as the emergence of a geographically expanding economic system based on unequal exchanges. Within this system, entire countries and world regions figured as centers while others took a peripheral or semiperipheral status. According to Wallerstein, the world system's patterns largely determined factors such as the global distribution of wealth and the topographies of free and unfree labor.[72]
As a general tendency, however, historiography in most parts of the world remained remarkably conservative in the sense that the vast majority of its practitioners stuck to national frameworks and in their own research did not systematically seek to challenge Eurocentric paradigms. It was only around the end of the Cold War that one could observe a growing interest in themes like global connections and cross-regional entanglements. This was much later than the beginnings of similar developments in other academic fields like, for instance, sociology or anthropology. This movement within historiography arguably occurred decades after new global connections had become blatantly visible in economic, cultural and social life. For this reason, the historian Akira Iriye assumes that toward the end of the Cold War, one could actually observe “historians falling behind history.”[73] [74]